Love, Forgiveness and Chocolate
by DaysandDistance
Summary: Ten things you didn't know about Remy Hadley. Five: "Like a child squeezing her eyes shut at a scary movie, she thought what wasn't seen didn't exist. That just because she ran the fastest 500 yards in the county, she could outrun things, people."
1. one

**A/N:** Well, I haven't written fanfiction in quite some time, and never in this fandom. But I have to say, [H]ouse's "Thirteen" caught my eye. She's both deeply flawed and a well-intentioned, self-aware, decent human being— and she only got more complex and more fascinating over time. Now that Olivia Wilde has left the show, I wanted to give my own take on Thirteen's backstory.

There will be ten one-shots, each under 1000 words, each set sometime pre-canon. No particular chronological order. Most will deal with multiple events, tied together thematically— and there will be quick jumps in timeline so watch for changes in tense. Present dialogue in quotation marks, past (remembered) dialogue is in italics.

Without further ado, here's the first of the series— dealing with Thirteen's love of contemporary art (Moving On) and her relationship with a thirty-year-old man at seventeen (Private Lives):

**Disclaimer:** I don't own [H]ouse, on which this piece is based, Thriving Ivory whose song "Hey Lady" this piece is titled after, or the incredibly talented Margaret Atwood's "Variations on the Word Sleep," which I quote.

* * *

><p>- <em>one -<em>

**BL**_UE_-_E_**Y**_E_**D M**_E_**T**_A_**PH**_O_**R**

**.**

_I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary._

Margaret Atwood

**.**

You've always had a soft spot for artists.

"Don't move."

You pause in the middle of Sartre, struggling to keep from squinting in the blinding mid-afternoon light as you hear the quick clicks of a camera.

He slides into the empty seat next to you, his dark hair windswept, his leather jacket out of place in the small-town coffeehouse. "You have beautiful contrast."

You're seventeen and accustomed to the occasional heavy-handed advance every time you sit alone in your college sweatshirt, hair held up in a messy bun by hilighters and gnawed pencils, and cargo bag full of used textbooks. But never quite like this.

"Philosophy?" He nods at the book in your hand, fingers stained with embarrassingly pink hilighter. "Yet pre-med, according to the orgo book in your bag. The contrasts continue."

Your hand wanders to push the textbook in question further into her bottomless pit of a bag. "Why is that a contrast?"

"My college bio prof always complained about philosophers— why ask questions but never answer them?"

You smile at the irony.

He holds out his hand. "James Seaver. Journalist by day, photographer by night."

.

He takes you to gallery openings in New York. Sheathed in dark velvet dresses and four-inch heels, you smile while he points out cubist influences in Wesselmann still lifes.

You've always liked art, but never so much as held a brush yourself. Unlike your mother, whose sheet music is still boxed away somewhere in the attic or Finn, who left caricatures of teachers in your locker, you've never been willing to use what you could so easily lose. You've always trusted your mind better than your hands.

You focus on keeping traction over gleaming marble floors.

You slipped on heels for the first time when you were thirteen. Your father gaped a little as you came down the stairs, half stumbling, head dipping every once in a while to catch your stride. He laughed a little, but you caught the slightest shadow of tears in his eyes and not for the first time, you wondered what— _who_ he sees.

Your father is a sociology professor with a knack for drawing patterns you could never quite wrap your head around. One of those summers you spent on the front stoop in cut-offs and pre-teen pretension, you decided to read every book in his study. Find out why absurdist, self-referential literature sustained him between days in lecture halls and nights in a hospice cot. How he could possibly lay a single red rose on your mother's grave and unflinchingly accept a careless woman's lies of omission, a daughter's hatred, a disease that took a pianist's steady hands, a mother's even temper, a woman's sense of self.

But you got stuck on _Infinite Jest._

On the last step, he reached out a hand to guide you. _You'll grow into it_.

And you did. You learned to walk in heels, learned how to dart lithely past the free throw line, just as you'll learn to pipet with nanoliter precision. You'll grow into that grown-up grace, that air of sophistication Anne never had.

When James looks at you, his eyes tracing the angles of your profile, he doesn't see her freckles across the bridge of your nose, the harshness of her jawline. He isn't searching for a familiar gesture or someone he loves— just a pretty girl, just the beauty of wide green eyes, dark hair on pale skin. And that, you can give.

You let him take off your dress that night. Between breaths, you make a mental note to yourself that in your spare moments between physics problem sets and philosophy papers, you'll decipher those topsy-turvy signatures and read up on fauvism and Dali and tachisme.

Sometimes, bathed in dawning light, before you have to battle New York traffic to get to nine o'clock Organic Chemistry, you forget where you are. His loft is in a midtown brownstone, filled with prints you're too young and too ill-read to recognize. But it may as well be your grandmother's Boston brick monstrosity lined with saints and unanswered questions. His hands, large with rough, flat nails, could be your father's, paging through Kerouac or pressed white against the kitchen sink.

You wonder if he still misses her— the breath of her laugh on his neck, the French ballads she'd sing lightly in the shower, the tightness with which she held her little boy's hand. You don't, but not because you hate her. You just can't miss something you never had. You might carry the burden of her chromosomes, but he holds something far worse— her memories.

So you try not to care too much when the slightest flicker of disappointment passes across his eyes when you couldn't hit the right pitch to save your life and fared far better at shooting three-pointers than pirouetting on pointe.

_You know I love you,_ he whispered, slinging an arm around your shoulder.

You do know that. You just don't know what he loves you for.

.

You took the photos before you left— a veritable stack of them. High-contrast black-and-whites or monochromatic prints, mostly. Clever angles to hide the tiny scar on your cheek, light striking your eyes for just the right ethereal shade. You had every intention of burning them— of destroying his art, of destroying the gullible, innocent, _weak_ girl he took you for— but flipping through those photos, you realized you didn't even know what he saw when he looked through that camera lens.

Years later, sitting across a table from Foreman, you think you must've always liked what you don't understand.

* * *

><p><strong>AN:** The last bit refers to that scene in The Tyrant when Thirteen says to Foreman, "I want to understand you." I considered referring to House instead, but strangely enough, House is someone Thirteen _does_ understand.

Reviews would be lovely. Have a great Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa/winter solstice.


	2. two

**A/N: **Take two. On Thirteen's childhood, her sense of detachment, and a little backhanded insight into why she might've wanted to be a doctor- a rather unusual choice given the circumstances. A little rough, I think, but it fit in well here as far as order and I'd like to get a few more pieces up before I go back to school.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own [H]ouse or Ivan Klíma's _Love and Garbage. _I feel I should also credit TehFuzzyPenguin as the scene here was inspired partially by his/her fanfiction "And Somtimes It's Not Chickening Out."

* * *

><p><em>- one -<em>

**GL**_A_**SS W**_A_**LLS**

_**.**_

_Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of._

Ivan Klíma

**.**

He doesn't bat an eye at the ten-year-old girl tucked away on the windowseat of the doctor's lounge, algebra homework at her feet, staring into the snowy evening. He pours himself a cup of coffee and then sets a mug on the side table in front of her, watching her leap at the clatter of porcelain against glass.

"Thank you," she says to his retreating back.

* * *

><p>Emily sat next to her in third grade. She had blonde hair, cropped to her chin, and wore bright sundresses in November. Her mother stayed at home, always ready to remind her daughter to hang up her coat and check her fractions homework. Her father, a doctor who wore collared shirts starched stiff, came home at six on the dot and sat at the head of the table.<p>

She remembers the afternoons she spent in Emily's room— circular, with shelving custom-designed to fit, filled with porcelain dolls and pop-up books and fleecy stuffed animals. She served imaginary tea to those rosy-cheeked dolls, and promised herself that her daughter would have a room like this.

But still, it's _her_ pliés, her flawless extensions Madame always praises, not Emily's.

* * *

><p>After his ER shift, he takes her to his office, a second-floor annex surrounded by glass on three sides. She sits carefully on the edge of his leather couch. He rummages in his drawers for a tin, bow and thank-you card still attached, and offered her a chocolate truffle. She unwraps the crinkled foil silently.<p>

"My dad always said never to talk to strangers, especially strangers who offer me candy," she say, her eyes tracing the placard that read, _Nephrologist_. "You don't by any chance have a white van, do you?"

He smiles over his paperwork, but just barely. "Kidneys."

"What?"

"Nephrology is the study of kidneys. You looked like you were wondering."

She focuses on her tightly clasped hands. "I was."

She wishes she didn't, but she wonders. So much that she read all those posters in the exam rooms and tapped her fingers over the neurologist's model of a human brain, so much that Dad used to buy her ice cream before Mom's appointments, Finn said, to glue her mouth shut.

But, these days, she doesn't ask. She knows now that some answers aren't worth knowing. There are only two kinds of people— the ones who give the answers and the ones who have to live with them.

She pops the chocolate in her mouth, lets the sweetness fuse her teeth together.

* * *

><p><em>I'm scared of your mom<em>, Emily said.

She is, too. She spent the night on the floor of Emily's room that night, breathed in the downy fleece of her blankets, the silence of a suburban house. For the first time in weeks, she slept through the night.

But just before her mind drifts into dreams, she wondered if her father was home tonight to notice her absence.

* * *

><p>The nurses would slip a five-cent lollipop into her hands sometimes with a saccharine smile. She caught her mother's neurologist eyeing her feet once as she followed her father down a hall, absentmindedly checking the steadiness of her gait as if she were one of Emily's china dolls blown to life-size. But this doctor hardly spares a glance at her, his eyes glued to his charts. Doesn't even ask if where her parents are, if she needs a ride home. Maybe he thinks she's a doctor's daughter. Like Emily.<p>

After all, if she can con her way into the doctor's lounge, into a nephrologist's glass office, why can't she slip on someone else's life?

But, maybe, he just doesn't care. He has bigger things to worry about.

It's past midnight, but he doesn't look scruffy like her father does— he is still freshly shaved and his hair is still neatly swept back, a single grey strand falling into his eyes. His scrubs were splattered with blood from the ER, but scrubs are disposable. After eight hours, he shuts his glass door on bus crashes and drug overdoses, and sits alone behind a mahogany desk. His answers are just diagnoses, diagnoses are just words on papers, and proof is in tests, not in pliés.

He doesn't have family photos on his desk. No ring on his fingers. Nobody to sit across the dining room table from, nobody to sleep in a hospital room chair for. He'll sleep alone on his couch tonight, surrounded by glass.

She knows there's a man beneath those dress shirts and ties, just like there are lives behind those files, consequences behind diagnoses. Maybe he falls asleep reading James Joyce like your father, wire-rim glasses slightly askew, maybe he puts his feet up in a chaise lounge and watches football on Sundays like Emily's father. But he doesn't let her see that. She's sitting mere feet from him but there is some invisible wall between them— even if she were to scream and pound against the glass, she can't break his sequestered glass cube. Nobody can destroy what was inside.

She thinks that one day, she might like to stand on the other side of that glass.

* * *

><p><strong>AN:** As always, reviews are greatly appreciated. I'll probably have another installment up by the end of the week.


	3. three

**A/N:** Merci beaucoup for the reviews and story alerts. A fairly short and simple entry this time, but I should have another one up by Sunday night or early next week.

A college story, as requested, on Lindsay (from Epic Fail). But don't get too excited- not much in the way of graphic imagery, sorry.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own House, Stars's "Your Ex-Lover is Dead" or Nicole Krauss's _The History of Love_.

* * *

><p><em>- three -<em>

_A _**FL**_E_**CK**_ O_**N**** M**_Y _**P**_O_**RC**_E_**L**_AI_**N**** SK**_I_**N**

**.**

_The truth is the thing I invented so I could live._

Nicole Krauss

**.**

Before college, you never wore makeup.

The first time Lindsay runs foundation over your cheeks, painstakingly applies mascara and eyeliner, and rubs a sheer gloss on your lips, you're captivated by her hands. Sure, fluid, graceful.

_Hold still_.

Like your mother used to say when she curled your hair for birthday parties and Christmas dinners. With those dark locks in ribboned ringlets, you looked like a porcelain doll, a princess from the black-and-whites in Dad's history books. You never thought she could burn you.

_See? Easy._

And it is. It stuns you how easily she wipes away flaws, hides imperfection beneath a delicate veneer.

She is equally deft in bed. Nothing like those hurried fumblings in darkened backseats or a stolen moment with the dresser hastily pushed against the bedroom door. You close your eyes because the door is locked and you're hundreds of miles away from anyone who would care. You leave the lights on, because on the surface, you are sixteen and quick-witted and doe-eyed. You are perfect.

She signs you up for jazz dance, and you agree because after a long afternoon in lab, a couple hours of plies and triple turns sounds just right. She implores you to play opposite her in some beret-clad aspiring director's post-modernist production— one that mandates you be artfully undressed.

So you run a razor over your legs, over old scars and darkened spots like Rorschach blots, detailing the day Finn pushed you down a ravine, the track practice you fell on the hurdles, the night you tumbled into the stairs running away from her. For a few hours each night, Remy Hadley doesn't exist.

One coat of Lindsay's foundation and it all disappears. Your bare skin is blindingly white under hot spotlights, a vast blank canvas.

* * *

><p><strong>AN:** Thirteen went to Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college known for its drama program. I thought that was very fitting, given what a great actress Thirteen is. And I liked the contradiction of her taking off her clothes for an audience yet revealing nothing at all.

And why is Thirteen sixteen in college, you might ask? Because the show tells us (in Wilson's Heart) that she was born after 1980, which makes her (at oldest) twenty-six or twenty-seven when she started to work for House. That's three years too young to be a specialized doctor, and I had to make up the years somewhere.

I adore reviews, especially thoughtful ones.


	4. four

**A/N:** A rather more serious topic this time. I'm pretty enraptured with the idea of Thirteen having a brother and this piece (and a few still to come) is meant to develop their relationship far beyond what the show did.

In particular, I wondered about what their relationship was like around the time his illness was setting in— and if Thirteen was ready or able to make the kind of commitment she so respected her father for making. And more generally about promises- in an interview with the writers of After Hours, Garrett Lerner and Russel Friend talked a bit about trying to portray what a promise meant to Thirteen and her brother and her mother, and I wanted to further explore that here.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own [H]ouse, Natalie Merchant's "My Skin," or the incredibly talented Jonathan Safran Foer's _Everything is Illuminated._

* * *

><p><em>- four -<em>

**PR**_O_**M**_I_**S**_E_**S**** WH**_I_**SP**_E_**R**_E_**D**** L**_I_**K**_E _**PR**_A_**Y**_E_**RS**

**.**

_One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family. _

Jonathan Safran Foer

**.**

She is twenty-two the first time she cajoles her way into the MRI room, and holds his hand as his face disappears beneath the behemoth. She tries not to glance at the figures on the other side of the monitors, faces obscured by tinted glass.

She was eight when she tried to run away from home for the first time, knapsack filled with Hershey's bars and pocket change. She hated that her mother didn't pack her lunch with Post-It notes wishing her luck on her spelling quiz. Hated the way the nurses at the hospice looked at her— looked _through_ her— as if they knew something she didn't.

She knows those things now, and more— organic chemistry and cell biology and quantum mechanics. But she still can't stop the revulsion from running down her spine.

"Remy?" he whispers, her name like a question. A small, snappish part of her brain wants to reprimand him for talking. He never had much regard for rules.

Finn pulled up to the curb of Newton North fall of her senior year, signed her out of AP Calculus, and drove her to Maine, to Arcadia, to a beach with sand so soft she sank a foot and water so frigid it burned. He blasted crappy nineties hits from his car radio and they danced barefoot along the surf, squealing at every lick of the waves and scurrying out of its reach. But they always tiptoed back.

For one day, she forgot about college applications and crossover drills and the heaviness in Dad's voice when he called to ask if she's coming home. For one day, there was just Finn and that was all the home she needed.

She takes his hand. It feels the same, just like when he snatched her hand as they crossed the street on the way to school; he brusquely dismissed her raised eyebrow— _I promised Mom I would_. Just like when he wrapped her hands around the barrel of a rifle and she shrieked at the recoil. Just like when he handed her that envelope. She looked up in horror, but he shrugged and said, _I'm glad it's not you_.

It feels the same, even if she knows bone-deep it isn't. Within weeks, those hands that once sketched her portrait in charcoal will falter, skewing his handwriting. In three years, that hand will make thumb-shaped bruises on her jugular— one day, that hand won't belong to Finn Hadley anymore.

She closes her eyes.

Last year, one of her med school professors took the class on rounds at NYP, led them to a closed exam room door, and asked them to diagnose the patient through two inches of wood. When it was her turn, she pressed her ear against the crack and heard not dull, rhythmic footfalls, but the long brush of rubber sole against linoleum. Like heels rubbing against carpet fibers.

_Early-onset Parkinson's_, she said, with a cursory glance at the chart. The professor nearly dropped his clipboard.

Sometimes, she wishes she could see through skin, through good intentions and idealistic mistakes, right through to the nerves falling apart, cell by cell. Like she learned to see through combustion engines and planes and sometimes even the occasional door. She's the daughter of an academic, a former mechanical physics tinkerer, a nosy little sister, an aspiring diagnostician— she should be happy to have the answers.

But Finn isn't a question.

"Will you stay?"

She can barely hear his words over the racket of the MRI, but she doesn't need to. She's been waiting for this ultimatum since his eyes darted around the corners of the coffeeshop last week, since he snapped at her when she misquoted a NYT article on the defense bill last month. Since those shuffling footsteps through a clinic room door. Since that envelope. She stares at the linoleum floor and sees the world turning backwards.

Despite the anatomy flashcards in her purse, she feels like that eight-year-old girl again.

But she's not eight years old anymore. She can't run away from this.

She probably will anyway.

She remembers that exam room door, remembers her professor's shocked chuckle and his hand clapping her shoulder, remembers the heady burst of thought that _here_, in hastily-scrawled charts and med school note cards and MRI images, are the secrets of who we are, just waiting to be decoded.

She doesn't remember that patient's name.

The tremor ripples through his fingers. She tightens her grip.

"Always."

* * *

><p><strong>AN:** Did she lie? Yes, she eventually left to pursue a job where I suspect she saw her brother very little, if at all, in the last years of his life, but in doing so, did she betray her brother? By keeping that one last promise, did Thirteen ultimately redeem herself for the way she treated her mother? How harshly you want to judge her is of course a matter of opinion, but I think that grey area is one of the most engaging issues surrounding Thirteen's story.

NYP refers to New York Presbyterian Hospital. In my mind, Thirteen went to med school at Columbia P&S. Also, FYI, it is possible to diagnose Parkinson's just by listening to a patient's footsteps. The story of a med school professor testing his students that way is from a Ramachandran book.

As always, I'd really appreciate constructive criticism. Review, s'il vous plaît?


	5. five

**A/N: **I apologize for the extraordinarily lengthy delay. I went back to school and this kind of got put on the back-burner. But there's something about this piece that keeps nagging at me, so I'm sure I'll finish it.

Based on "Not knowing makes me do things I think I'm scared to do— take flying lessons, climb Kilanmanjaro...work for you." (You Don't Want to Know):

* * *

><p>- <em>five -<em>

_U_**P IN TH**_E AI_**R**

**.**

_We were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged. It was one of the best days of life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all._

Jonathan Safran Foer

_**.**_

"Don't look down."

She does anyways, and it takes her breath away. Hanging off the side of a cliff at 15,000 feet, the speckled African savanna unfolds before her eyes. It's stunning and it's terrifying. She relishes both.

When she left for college, she packed her VW bug so tightly that the boxes stacked to the roof of the backseat. Finn, downing a bottle of water in the September heat, laughed that it hardly mattered that her rearview held only cardboard because she never glanced back anyways. _You won't even notice._

He wasn't wrong. She hugged him goodbye that morning and didn't so much as call until the trees were bare. A decade later, she boards a plane for Newark and doesn't return until the mutagenic proteins have wiped her from his mind.

"Come on, Rem."

Ethan is a NYU senior who goes skydiving on long weekends and whose idea of a "vacation" is "voluntourism" in Tanzania. He makes her heart rate soar, for the best and worst reasons. The first time they kissed, on the fire escape of a hole-in-the-wall club in Chelsea, he'd tilted her chin towards his and whispered, a smirk in his voice, _How long can you hold your breath?_

He could've been her storybook romance, if she had known how to recognize a fairy tale.

He reaches out a hand and she takes it. Praying she won't need the asthma inhaler in her pack, she takes a deep breath and scales the last few feet to the nearest ledge, the momentum carrying all 115 pounds of her straight into Ethan. His arms encircling her waist, she glances down again.

When she remembers him, she remembers that September morning, that moment just before she slipped into the driver's seat, the way he touched her cheek and, after a moment's hesitation, said, _Don't drive too fast._

She did anyways. Like a child squeezing her eyes shut at a scary movie, she thought what wasn't seen didn't exist. That just because she ran the fastest 500 yards in the county, she could outrun things, people. It's not the future she's afraid of, but the past— not what's out there, but what's been inside all along.

But she looks back, looks down, because it terrifies her. She climbs mountains and flies planes because even stairs without risers bump up her blood pressure. She keeps the memories, hangs them around her neck like gold, because, in two years, in five, in ten, he won't be able to.

They're above the clouds. When she was four or five, peering down at clouds from a cliff in Maine, she'd have sworn that if she leapt from that height, she'd fly. But Finn was the one who almost tried— before Dad caught him by the scruff of the neck.

They were both wrong. Everything falls someday— it's the speed that differs, not the trajectory. After graduation, Ethan will ship out to basic training and later to the New York state senate. But even if he hadn't already bartered three years of service for college tuition, even if she knew how to bake chocolate-chip cookies, even if she used words like _forever_, she knows bone-deep that this will end in good-bye. They aren't the sort of people who stay.

With the adrenaline fading, her ankles tremble a little. She grips the cord tighter— it's a long way down.

But today isn't someday. Today, she thinks, this narrow ledge in the middle of endless savanna, where the past is placated and the present is good and the future doesn't seem quite so daunting, is happiness. Today, even with the altitude and the exertion, she feels like she's _really_ breathing for the first time.

She turns around to face Ethan. _Want to go flying?_

* * *

><p><strong>AN:** Reviews are greatly appreciated. Did I mention they also motivate me to update faster?


End file.
